Steve Jobs, the Apple co-founder, didn’t care about the gender of his colleagues, just as long as they could get the job done.
Those were some of the remembrances by a Who’s Who of Apple female leaders at an event at SAP Labs in Palo Alto Monday night. The event was inspired by the recent release of the screenwriter Aaron Sorkin’s “Steve Jobs.”
“He was so focused on his agenda. He didn’t let anything get in the way,” said Andy Cunningham, founder of Cunningham Collective, a marketing innovation consultancy and former publicist for Jobs at Apple, NeXT and Pixar.
The event was the brainchild of Cunningham and Joanna Hoffman, one of the original members of the Macintosh team and NeXT, who is portrayed by the actress Kate Winslet in the film. As they discussed the movie, they marveled how many women worked for Jobs at a high level, she said.
“Joanna was the one who represented all of us in learning how to stand up to Steve,” said Debi Coleman, the finance and operations chief at Macintosh and Apple for over a decade. “That’s one of the reasons she’s a heroine to me.” But standing up to Jobs was something he expected, the women said.
Also speaking were Susan Barnes, controller of the Macintosh Division at Apple and a cofounder of NeXT and Barbara Koalkin Barza, former product marketing manager for the Macintosh computer and later director of marketing at Pixar.
As Bruce Newman wrote in the Mercury News, there are a lot of mixed feelings in Silicon Valley over the Sorkin take on Jobs. But at this event, the Steve Jobs that emerged was one appreciated for his fierce passion and drive that meant he judged his colleagues on whether they cared as much as he did about a product’s success.
Barnes recalled how she went to negotiate a deal with an Apple partner, and the chairman of the company said that she was to go pearl shopping while the men talked about the deal. A fax arrived from Jobs: Ms. Barnes makes the decision on this negotiation.
Jobs, the women recalled, spoke in the 1980s about how despite Japan’s economic success, it would be hobbled as an economy in the long term because women were confined to a limited role.
Jobs noted that Coleman was hiring only women in the finance group, and asked, “When are you going to hire men?” She replied, “When you double my head count.”
Above: Steve Jobs (Tom Munnecke/Getty Images).
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